New week, new me! A quick overview: setting up a network attached storage (NAS) at home for untold tomfoolery, rendering blog posts on my website, berry picking with my girlfriend, and lots of social stuff downtown and online.
Networking my storage (coffee chat not included)
Starting with the NAS, this baby is effectively a personal cloud platform attached to your wifi. It has access control and even encryption, so if someone steals the hard drives, your data is moot without the password. I'm very excited for the possibilities here, but I learned that my most ambitious ideas won't come to life because it's an old model that my dad snagged from work after they wiped it clean and were about to throw it out. The coolest thing I would've done is make a full app ecosystem where I could run websites and use a low compute AI model that runs locally on it - various possibilities like answering questions about our own data, secure banking info, automatic photo organization, all fun stuff.
What the NAS is actually doing is providing a ton of storage for our phones and laptops. There's a photo app that lets us upload photos to the NAS, share them with each other (they're private to you by default), and even sort them by size! I can't believe the NAS did what Apple has never done for us... anyways. I've also set up some git workflows to push to the NAS as a secondary backup for codebases that I am especially fond of. Not that I don't trust GitHub. But it's nice to have the extra backup.
Connecting with people, old school
I saw some friends downtown and decided to create my own games for us to play. No board games? No problem! Paper and pens are easy to procure, so I came up with some drawing/word games that actually had everyone laughing and I was very proud of. I know we have a whole world of games on our phones, but there's a very unique human connection in this "antique" way of enjoying your time.
The blogs come out
Before meeting some cool people downtown, I wanted to share some of my writing like these blogs. I've always felt that reading someone's writing is like a view into their soul, in a very dramatic sense. Less dramatically, I just feel connected because to me, writing is often the flow of words straight from the brain, and I feel like I have less filters in writing, so I've always felt a more authentic connection when reading writing that seems like it comes from someone's pure thoughts.
That's a long way to say that I made a full markdown pipeline of my website which turns these markdown files into publishable blogs. Stylized, fun, and with organization on the main blog page!
Meeting people through an AI superconnector
In other social areas, I met Tanishq from India who is building a crypto intelligence and trading platform, as well as John from Canada building an autonomous R&D workflow to keep companies in the loop about useful research signals. Both were cool, where the first had me able to give some advice (my own thoughts and opinions on what I would care about and focus on building, until I deferred to other founders for his questions about funding), and the second being a nice chat between two guys who like building things. I was honoured that at the end, John asked some questions that hinted he thought I was impressive enough to interview as a new team member, but I decided that his startup wasn't what I wanted to prioritize as an upcoming graduate. I was also proud of the recap that Boardy sent me about calling Tanishq, so I've copied it at the end.
A berry good time
Berry picking with my girlfriend was fantastic at Andrews Farm in Milton and I realized that if I'm paying for berries, I'm making sure that I pick the best quality ones. My ROI suffered though because I was too picky and barely took any home in comparison. The silver lining is that they were all very good, as opposed to my girlfriend who got way more berries, with some being slightly sour. I say my ROI suffered because the "not perfect" ones that she had weren't that much worse, so I could have had far more great berries rather than a select amount of prime berries. Oh well. A lesson for next time.
Overall, an action packed week. I got to explore fun personal projects, see people I care about dearly, and meet interesting new people. Honestly, I'm getting kind of worried about new grad applications because I don't have any clear deliverable projects from the summer, but I hope that my previous experience more than makes up for it. After all, projects are one thing, but I'm learning a lot about how to talk to others, form connections, and build the relationships that I find value in, and I think that will take me pretty far in life.
Till next time :)
Boardy's Thoughts
After calling with Tanishq, here's what Boardy said:
Quick debrief on the Tanishq chat.
You showed up as a peer, not just a connector. The three bottlenecks you named (regulation for self-directed accounts, data latency/quality, developer transparency through logging) were grounded in your Scotiabank experience and directly useful to someone building in crypto. Tanishq clearly valued it, he called it one of his better conversations.
Your advice on trust and ease of use as the two priorities for a product handling people's money was spot on. The Stanley AI referral was a practical, low-cost GTM suggestion that he can act on immediately. And your honesty about not having fundraising experience, then redirecting to me and to talking with founders in similar situations, was the right move. It kept the conversation real instead of pretending to have answers you don't.